Mining The Thought Stream — What if you could peer into the thoughts of millions of people as they were thinking those thoughts or shortly thereafter? And what if all of these thoughts were immediately available in a database that could be mined easily to tell you what people both individually …

Tracking the iPhone's bubble of hype — Think of the jagged light blue line in the fever chart at right as the bubble of hype that keeps Apple's (AAPL) iPhone floating above of its competitors. — What you're looking at is a snapshot of a Google Trends chart comparing the number of times the word …

Do We Need a New Internet? — Two decades ago a 23-year-old Cornell University graduate student brought the Internet to its knees with a simple software program that skipped from computer to computer at blinding speed, thoroughly clogging the then-tiny network in the space of a few hours.

The Definitive Primer to the Pirate Bay Trial — The trial against the Pirate Bay will start in Sweden on Monday, and file sharers and P2P journalists alike can hardly contain themselves. The Times of London has dubbed it the “Internet piracy trial of the decade,” and the Pirate Bay's staff …

MTV Pulls The Plug On Embeddable Videos — When NBC Universal and News Corporation-backed Hulu launched in Fall 2007, it was a signal that old television media might actually grasp the distributive power of the internet. Not only were great programs made available for free as streaming videos …

A Successful Failure — FAIL WHALE — Yiying Lu, an artist and a designer in Sydney, Australia, has made a number of appealing illustrations, many featuring animals. But one image in her portfolio is far more likely to be familiar to at least some of you than any of the others …

A brief history of chip fibs, flops: Intel, IBM, AMD — Even the biggest chip companies churn out their share of flops. But the hype that surrounds these chips is more fascinating than the failures. — It's been almost a year since I posted A brief history of chip hype—and flops (part 1).

How Patent Trolls Are A Tax On Innovation — I've written on the subjects of patents before on this blog and on the Union Square Ventures weblog. There have been good discussions around this issue, both in this post and in the sessions event that the USV weblog posts talks about.

How Google Decides to Pull the Plug — GOOGLE recently set the blogosphere abuzz by announcing that it was pulling the plug on several products. — The victims included Lively, a virtual world that was Google's answer to Second Life; Dodgeball, a cellphone service aimed at young bar-hoppers …

As The Economy Sours, LinkedIn's Popularity Grows — As layoffs continued to pound the economy in January, one beneficiary was job networking site LinkedIn. According to the latest January data from comScore, the LinkedIn's U.S. unique visitors shot up 22 percent to 7.7 million, up from 6.3 million in December.